Bad Timing

by Betsy Berne

  “Yeah. A lot of good that’ll do me.” And I lapsed into a bitter, reverberating silence.

  He was restless in his seat, and his hands were all over the place. He was used to winning with words, and I’d unwittingly beaten him with silence. “What is it?”

  I was unable to shake the silent attack. I was the one who was going to be haunted. It was bleak. And on top of it I’d been bewitched again. Through no fault of my own, of course. The run of bad luck was getting me down. It wasn’t just the hormones. I raised my head, and the reliable high squeaky voice was pried loose, lubricated by a huge transparent smile. “You don’t want to be late,” I said. “And I’m tired. Let’s go.”

  “Oh, you’re tired.” He seemed somewhat relieved but still unnerved. He tended to repeat my words when he was unnerved.

  “Yeah, I am tired.” I plastered another smile across my face. “I’m pregnant. Remember?”

  He winced but recovered cunningly. “Oh, yes, I do, I do remember. We’ve managed to avoid that particular phrase up until now, haven’t we?” He held the credit-card receipt tightly with one hand and tore it too slowly and too meticulously into tiny scraps with the other.

  “You’re right. We did. We’ve managed to avoid more than that, wouldn’t you say? Can we go?”

  The rain had stopped. It was glaringly bright, bleary-eyed hot outside, so I had an excuse to blink away anything that shouldn’t have been in the eye area. We walked together for a block, not saying much, until he hailed a cab. Before he got in he turned and took me by the shoulders and kissed me hard, a kiss that belied our mutual deceit. It felt like he wanted to infuse me with something more, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to.

  “Shall we talk on Monday?”

  “I guess so,” I mumbled and started to walk away.

  He shouted after me furiously, exasperated, “Do you want to, or don’t you?”

  I looked back surprised. Couldn’t he read my mind? “Yes, yes, I do,” I shouted back.

  He got in the cab, and I dodged and weaved my way through the shoppers. I ran until I was wet and steamy, and when I reached Canal Street, I floated, an ominous float, the rest of the way home.

  •

  There were messages when I got home, from those eager for the latest news, even though the meeting at the dark bar had been a carefully concealed development. I ignored them, including one from the silent-treatment recipient, Rachel. Not that she’d noticed she was getting the silent treatment.

  A perky nonethnic, she’d grown up pedigreed in the city, where she now ran a small classy company that published art and photography books. She had become one of the busy people who move in fast crowds made faster by rich foreigners and prissy art fags. Our friendship, a long boarding-school-based friendship, had begun to flounder recently. Rachel was always getting swept away by a fresh fast crowd, and even when she tried to include me, it never took. After all, who needs a human black cloud hovering over a fast and sunny crowd?

  I didn’t call her back. I turned on the TV. Back-to-back episodes of a very reliable program were on. I couldn’t really ask for more than a couple of back-to-backs—reruns no less—my most treasured part of summer in town. It was a poignant little program. Two parents had disappeared in a tragic plane crash and left a good-looking brood of orphans behind. The oldest orphan, earnest, brawny, in his twenties, had been left in charge of his siblings: a winsome toddler, a gurgling infant, and two woebegone but adorable younger teens. There was enough hugging and door slamming to satisfy any viewer who wasn’t feeling 100 percent, and tonight’s episodes were priceless. The female teen, Julia, had finally begun sleeping with her adorable boyfriend (after much advertiser-placating angst), and guess what happened? It was uncanny. Julia and her boyfriend were sparring—she was undecided about keeping the baby, and the boyfriend wanted her to keep it and get married and move in with his parents. I didn’t know who to root for, and by the time she had the miscarriage, my eyes were gathering moisture.

  I was wavering. My decision wasn’t quite taking. Just as Julia was on the way home from the clinic, weeping in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and I was in the process of reversing my decision and trying not to weep, Rachel called again.

  “How are you?” I mustered up as much chirpiness as I could.

  “Really upset. I don’t want to talk about it.” Uh-oh, testy and bitter. I preferred Rachel’s misty, undiscerning side, which provided me with a glimmer of how the other half lived. Better to remain silent to avoid more antagonism. She continued: “I’ve been out every night and sobbing all day, and I’m exhausted—je ne sais pas. I can’t do anything. C’est très très mal.” Rachel had taken to peppering her litanies with French phrases, a practice that made me twitch. “Things with Jean aren’t going so well, but I was hoping I might be pregnant. I just found out I’m not.”

  Rachel was one of the modern desperados who eschewed birth control without bothering to inform the man they had chosen to be the father of their child. This was one of our many chronic disagreements but one with a rare dynamic: I took the old-fashioned stance, while she went modern.

  “Oh.” The irony—a word I found distasteful—that was infiltrating my life (instead of my paintings, where it could have been at least fashionable and lucrative) wasn’t amusing. She kept talking but I stopped listening. Because of the silent treatment, Rachel knew only a few hazy facts about the perpetrator and nothing about the predicament. “I just found out I am,” I began.

  “You just found out you are what?”

  “Well, pregnant.”

  That disrupted her “I don’t want to talk about it” monologue. “Who . . . oh, you mean that night? That guy? You never told me who he was. Was he handsome? I don’t remember. Was he smart? He was, wasn’t he? That’s fantastic. You’re so lucky. If only I were pregnant. That would solve everything.”

  “No, well, actually, it hasn’t solved a thing. Actually, it’s created—”

  “That would be the answer to all my problems,” she continued. “Oh, if only I was pregnant. You know, I really thought I was this time.”

  “Wait a minute. I don’t think I can keep it.”

  “Why not? You’d be a great mother. Of course you’ll keep it.” I was frosty when I delivered my speech, and she didn’t listen long.

  “There’s my buzzer—I have to run. It sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” she snapped.

  “I thought I did, but I don’t know if I have anymore. I just don’t—”

  “I’ll call you later. The reason I called was because I wanted to talk more about the party after your opening.”

  I finished watching the episode. Julia and her boyfriend ended up back together, and I was pleased about that but I didn’t feel so good about Rachel. Maybe she had meant well. My mother had always sided with the enemy during my battling teen years. “Aw, honey she means well” was in there rock solid with the rest of the platitudes. Rachel had managed to distract me for a few minutes. The diabolical hormones were directed toward her now instead of the situation or myself or the perpetrator. Did he mean well, too?

  She had reminded me of my show, something that had slipped behind on the worry list. Before the predicament had surfaced I’d been consumed with it, wallowing alternately in daydreams of sweet revenge or abject terror. The opening was another obstacle. Art openings aren’t my idea of a good time even when I’m not a guest of honor. And they’re never complete without a private celebration afterward. I was an awkward and unaccomplished celebrator, since my family had never indulged in such folly. The last time I’d tried to personally fake a celebration was on my twenty-fifth birthday. A disaster. Rachel had suggested a sit-down dinner for thirty—this was back when I had the first and second strings of friends—and another ten for dessert and champagne. I hate dessert and I hate champagne. But I obeyed. I timidly brought up the possibility that the B-list ten might be insulted. Rachel scoffed. Never saw the B-list ten again.

  This new train of thought distracted but
not nearly enough. I was en route to the sanctuary when I remembered. It was Thursday night: Deejay Night. Deejay Night was my neighbor’s private exorcism, which he enacted at a Village bar furnished lavishly in mahagony and velvet. It was a Clark Kent–Superman kind of thing; during the day he toiled away at his art criticism, and most evenings he continued toiling at social functions to ensure that the daytime toiling would see the light. It was heartening to see him behind the turntable, periodically breaking into song, dancing blindly, pretending not to hear anyone.

  But there was one little problem. The night allegedly began at eleven o’clock, which was hard enough for an early person to stay up for, but it didn’t hit its stride until midnight or even later. My neighbor was the original late person (the snake hid the tendency until he had me hooked), and it had been the cause of endless altercations between us. When we arranged a rendezvous, I would be in place, relaxed and expectant, at the appointed hour. By the time he strolled in all cheery and leisurely, my face would have turned tight and would instantly suck all the cheer out of his. Eventually I figured out the solution: drop the tight-faced routine and learn to be late. (During one late battle he informed me curtly that it was outright rude to arrive at a dinner party less than forty-five minutes late.) Once we realized it was another case of diametrically opposed gene-related traits and we made a few minor adjustments, it rarely caused a problem. Except for Deejay Night. I could never be late enough. I’d get close, but there was always an endless half hour where I had to keep up a steady yawn so as not to go pained and tight-lipped. I had company. By the time my neighbor staggered in under the weight of his bulging bag of discs, there was a lineup of mousy, balding, effeminate Jewish men with tightly drawn faces waiting alongside me. How was I going to manage Deejay Night in my current condition when all I really wanted to do was end this day and start fresh and more stalwart in the morning?

  I called my friend Sam. I’d taken one glance at Sam in art school and decided no, absolutely not. He was a little guy with long straggly dirty blond hair, and in those days he was covered in black leather with only one accessory: a massive Great Dane by his side. I’d just been released from the progressive boarding school and was still recuperating from the onslaught of rich kids trying to be eccentric, and I pegged him for another one. It wasn’t until I moved to the city and ran into him at an opening that I got it. He informed me right off he was no longer Samuel, he was Sam; and later, if I slipped up, particularly in mixed company, he informed more stridently. His blond hair was longer and stragglier, he wore silk (they may have been polyester) Fourteenth Street T-shirts, slinky jeans, and big black boots, and he accessorized with the pit bulls instead of the Great Dane. We hit it off, and soon he was picking me up a few nights a week in his shiny green ’73 Lincoln. Before I met Sam I drank white-wine spritzers, but Sam said he couldn’t possibly be seen with a girl who drank white-wine spritzers. He taught me to drink vodka instead—he was one of the Jews who drank. There was something comforting about Sam, and it didn’t take long to figure it out. He was a miniature Long Island–flashy version of my oldest brother, the King. Sam and the King got along beautifully. The King was a criminal lawyer, and Sam had committed some crimes along the way—which were never his fault, of course. The King became his consigliore. Sam called the King Scarface, and when he’d arrive in the green Lincoln at the King’s midtown law firm all jazzed up in his finery, the King would yell to his partners, “The hit man is here!” and they’d all gawk.

  Now Sam had a sharp cropped blond hairdo, and he mixed the Fourteenth Street look with Maine fisherman. He still wore the silk or polyester T-shirts, but now he draped plaid flannel shirts over them, unbuttoned, and recently he’d taken to wearing club-kid polyester track pants with iridescent white stripes. Sam had also stopped painting. He used to paint naked females astride flying leopards, which sounds silly, but they weren’t. They captured a yearning, a melancholy beauty, that went beyond naked females on flying leopards. He got out early because of a financial “misunderstanding” with his dealer, one of a group of wealthy divorced housewives who became art dealers. Sam wasn’t humble or lucky enough to stick it out. He wanted a normal life, and he had one now, with his contracting business and a few of the nasty scrawny girls that he fancied in the wings. But it didn’t make up for painting, so he was always flailing away at bitterness and malaise.

  He picked me up in his truck this time, with the pit bulls in the back, and as we inched our way up Sixth Avenue toward Deejay Night, I made a halfhearted attempt to gain some wisdom. His earlier advice regarding the perpetrator had been straightforward: “Don’t you remember the Kraut? Remember I had to make her suffer for the sins of her people? It was fun at first, but take it from me. Stick to your own kind.”

  His current advice was also to the point: “If the Puerto Rican next door can afford six kids, you can afford one.” Sam liked nothing better than to offend smarmy liberals. You can be assured he was one of the few friends of mine that my neighbor allowed to cross the sacred portals of Deejay Night.

  By the time we arrived, my Thursday-night friends—the cream of my neighbor’s coterie—were all in position. My neighbor was shimmying away behind the turntable, with his expression of blind ecstasy. Victor was posed in front of him, immutable. He’d dressed for Deejay Night in a shift belted loosely at the waist, maroon bloomers, and a dark striped jacket with various slits for ventilation. The rest of the crowd was a conglomeration I could only guess at, students on dates squeezed on velvet couches, saucy drag queens strolling up and down the mahogany bar.

  We sat by the turntable, where there were enough nasty scrawny girls around for Sam to lick his chops over. The Thursday-night friends observed a certain protocol. No one had to interact if they didn’t feel like it, and you could tell by just looking at someone’s Thursday-night face if they didn’t. On the other hand, if you did feel like it, these nights could develop into group therapy sessions, with the Thursday-night friends spilling a week’s worth, or a life’s worth, of woes, and there was no need to divulge any particulars when you only knew one another on the Thursday nights. This evening I had a look-but-don’t-touch face on.

  At around two o’clock Sam started making noises about leaving—one of his scrawny girls was undoubtedly on call somewhere—so I said, “Go.” He was taken aback. Usually I was the one half out some door, urging him to stay on without me: “You’re having fun. Let me go, you’ll do fine without me.” But Deejay Night had sedated me, and I was in no hurry to go home.

  Eventually it was down to me, my neighbor, faithful sentinel Victor, and the waiters behind the bar, sweeping, counting the loot, and still dancing. My neighbor and Victor were astonished. They were concerned, knowing my fragile state, but still they teased me. I’d never made it to the bitter end of Deejay Night before.

  I woke up the next morning the way you do when someone has just died: fresh and ready to go for a few seconds, then memory intrudes and time’s up. You know you’re not going anywhere.

  C H A P T E R

  5

  THERE WERE ONLY a few strays in the gallery. People in the business don’t generally start arriving at a six o’clock opening until six-thirty or seven. I would have preferred to arrive late, but I was a guest of honor. I had to greet. People always complain that there is never a chance to “have a real conversation” at a crowded opening. But it’s far worse when it’s not yet crowded, when you do have enough time to have a real conversation, because how can you have a real conversation in an inhuman expanse of cold white rectangles under incandescent lights where you can’t even sit down?

  Fortunately this gallery had an austere elegance that was not pretentiously austere. It had been around long enough to establish a certain cachet, although it certainly wasn’t the kind of gallery with hired help serving champagne in fluted glasses. This gallery served respectable white wine in durable plastic cups. I had time to glance at my fellow artists’ work. Two of the artists painted interpretations of
work from the past. This was also considered ironic, and it was, simply because it had been going on for over twenty years and no one had exposed the real hoax. One artist did fake Warhols, and the other did fake Rembrandts. The third made feminist art that could also be categorized as sexual: installations that used garbage and dresses to symbolize female body parts. Dresses as feminist symbols were a hot commodity this year—the critics had rediscovered a relationship between fashion and art yet again.

  I was wearing a dress—I guess you could call it art, performance art—a navy dress that was a touch transparent but demurely, stylishly. This was a business occasion, and the importance of appearance could not be emphasized enough. You didn’t want to look tarty, but you didn’t want to appear too dowdy, either. The director of the gallery, on the other hand, did not look at all stylish or tasteful. She was a daffy did-I-say-that kind of gal, decked out in a rambunctious red suit—the kind of suit newscasters wear—exposing a snakeskin décolletage, which was emphasized further by an excess of costume jewelry.

  From my corner I watched while she slathered a fake Warhol promo job on a collector. Protectively, I moved closer to my group of paintings. I tried to be objective about them. They didn’t strike me as too terribly grisly. The fake Warhols struck me as a more grisly lot. I had a pretty grisly week ahead of me: at least two more hours of white rooms and incandescent lights, an intimate candlelit dinner party afterward (hosted by staunch Rachel, of course), and, in a few days, under floodlights, an abortion—or termination, as they called it in the business. I welcomed this term. It was terse and matter-of-fact, without the melodrama and angst induced by the other term. On the brighter side, I’d finished writing the lipstick article, and I had some respite before the butchering—or as magazines referred to it, the editing process.